Selenites

The Selenites are an insect civilization of the lunar interior, each body shaped from birth for a single lifelong function: vast-brained intellectuals, many-handed calculators, muscle-bound laborers, all beneath the Grand Lunar, a sovereign that is mostly brain. The society runs as one organism, without choice or waste.

The template is entirely H.G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901), whose explorers reach the Moon in a Cavorite-coated sphere and transmit an account of Selenite society before contact cuts. The ufological afterlife came later: hollow-Moon and moonbase writers, notably George Leonard (Somebody Else Is on the Moon, 1976) and Richard Hoagland's lunar-artifact claims, borrowed the inhabited-interior premise while trading insects for installations.

None; even the lore's own inhabitants are acknowledged fiction. The adjacent claims are photographic: alleged structures and machinery in Apollo and orbiter imagery.

From Méliès's 1902 film (cinema's first aliens) to modern games, the Selenite is a foundational science fiction image, and "the Moon is artificial or hollow" persists as an internet-era conspiracy with Soviet-era speculative roots (the Vasin-Shcherbakov spaceship-Moon essay of 1970).

Selenography settled the surface long ago, Apollo's seismometry characterized the interior (rigid, differentiated, emphatically not hollow), and every "structure" claim has resolved to image artifacts and pareidolia. The Selenite entry exists to mark where the lore's lunar imagination came from: a novel, openly. As the guide's cleanest fiction-to-folklore case, it needs no debunking, only a bibliography.